taking the hard road
by SkywardShadow
Summary: It's been thirty years since the war, thirty years since Itachi's death, and Shisui still visits his grave every day. :Oneshot; followup to 'from here to eternity':


**A/N: So I wrote this well over a year ago, in response to an LJ meme that involved writing sequel snippets to existing fic. If y'all remember my massive fic 'from here to eternity' you know where this is going, although I guess it's not required reading. Anyway, finally crossposting, so enjoy. :)**

**-taking the hard road**

Sasuke still comes to visit sometimes.

They don't say much. It's to be expected, really. Shisui knows the kid (a force-of-habit nickname; his little cousin outgrew it a long time ago) only comes out of a misplaced sense of loyalty—Shisui, he knows, was important to his big brother. And if someone was important to his big brother Sasuke would, however grudgingly, accept them as well. So he visits; often bringing some form of food, occasionally passing on some important piece of news.

The gesture is one Shisui has never quite been able to work out if he appreciates or not. For one thing it makes him feel old, even though he's been so by ninja standards for years. And also because family or no, things have never been the same since Itachi died.

It's been a long time. A _long_ time, longer than most shinobi ever hope to live, but somehow the hurt has never lessened. He once read somewhere—or heard it, maybe, in some Academy class he was actually paying attention to—that people who have lost loved ones need time to mourn before they can move on and begin to heal. That for most, although the pain never truly goes away, it becomes somewhat less over time.

Shisui isn't an idiot. He knows that just because he happened to love Itachi with everything he had, it doesn't make him special. Shinobi lose people they love all the time—brothers, wives, children; hell, it's practically in the job description. He knows he's not the only one who's had a hole punched out of them by someone's death. He _knows_ all that.

It just never really helped.

_Great, listen to me,_ he groans silently. _I might as well be a kid again, way I'm carrying on._

His thoughts are interrupted by the sound of a door sliding open. Calmly, he reaches for a kunai knife—one of many precautions, just in case some Genin brat got it in their head to play a prank on a blind man. Or in case Konoha got breached again, like it had in his childhood; it's never happened since, of course, but the ninja life tends to make paranoid maniacs out of the ones it doesn't kill straight off.

"Relax," a perpetually gruff voice tells him. The body possessing the voice kicks off its shoes and settles into the opposing seat. "It's just me."

Shisui exhales slowly and sits back in his chair, grip on the knife loosening. "Inabi, how many times do I have to ask you to _knock_ first? It's not that hard, I promise."

"Somehow you never outgrew being a smartass," the older man remarks, dry as salt.

They lapse into a familiar silence. Shisui will probably never bring it up, but he will always be grateful to Inabi for keeping him together after the Fourth War ended. Inabi understood what he was going through better than anyone else, his little brother having been killed in the same war as Itachi, and he didn't ask questions. Shisui has often marveled at the man's ability to retain the typical Uchiha stick-in-the-mud gene while still managing to be a decent human being.

"The new Hokage's been chosen," Inabi remarks. Shisui shrugs, prompting a comment of "You don't seem surprised."

"I help teach basic Fire jutsu at the Academy four times a week," Shisui reminds him. "My TA loves to blab. I'm blind, Inabi, not deaf."

Inabi hesitates, like he'd forgotten about that little Uchiha caveat. (That would be a trick, seeing as his own eyesight has been slowly deteriorating for the better part of three decades.) With a morbid sort of curiosity Shisui wonders what he looks like now. That's the funny thing about going blind, he supposes: everyone he's ever known exists in his mind exactly as they looked almost thirty years ago. Even his own appearance is more or less a mystery, and somehow he gets the feeling he prefers it that way.

"It's that Naruto kid the Toad Sage picked up," Inabi says, continuing the conversation as if there had been no pause. "Too loud for my taste, but he seems decent enough. He's a friend of Sasuke's, isn't he?"

Shisui snorts. It quickly becomes a series of rapid-fire sneezes. _Damn, I have got to dust sometime._ "Yeah. Friends. Let's go with that, shall we?"

"I'm not touching that one," Inabi informs him flatly. "I've heard enough about this family's questionable love lives to last the rest of my time."

The silence that follows is decidedly more uncomfortable, Shisui notes. It's never a good time when someone steps on the equivalent of a land mine. Which is a stupid metaphor, obviously, because land mines lead to bombs and bombs lead to that (_goddamn psychotic piece of-_) Iwa kid during the war and that leads to-

"I'm going for a walk," he says in a light tone that's almost convincing.

And damn if he can't _feel_ Inabi's knowing nod.

**.**

Konoha is pretty easy to navigate from memory. Shisui spent much of his childhood after arriving in the village wandering skeptically around it, making stubborn mental comparisons to his old home in Whirlpool. Leaf had eventually won him over with its vibrancy, the way it never stopped moving, but you never forget your first love.

It's another stupid, stupid metaphor. Shisui resists the urge to smack himself in the head only because he's surrounded by pedestrians now, and they don't need any more reasons to think him crazy.

After all, only a crazy person would rebuke the Elders as he once did. Only a crazy person would hand in his resignation at so young an age, in so hotheaded a manner. The details of that little meeting were technically classified, but somehow the gossipers always knew when something worthy of talk had gone down. He'd gotten more than his share of odd looks afterwards; if there was one upside to being sightless, it was that he was free to completely ignore all of _that_ bullshit.

Anyway, the fact is that he still knows his way around pretty well. The only hiccup is when some new building gets replaced or an old one gets expanded. More than once he's walked into walls that _weren't there yesterday, dammit all _and made an idiot of himself.

But in a near-lifetime of living in Konoha, Shisui has never known anyone to put up shop in the pathway to the memorial stones. So that's never a problem. After years and years and years of walking this path daily, then weekly, then daily again when he felt like a tremendous ass for doing the weekly, his feet know the way better than eyes ever could. He has it memorized, right down to the exact markers.

He visits his mother and Teyaki first. Teyaki was a trained shinobi but an injury kept him from ever going to battle, and his Whirlpool wife was never a kunoichi, so they are buried in the citizen graveyard. Shisui speaks to them awhile, dusts off the tops of the grave markers and heads for the memorial stones. The space set aside for loyal ninja and heroes.

Itachi was both.

Shisui knows that there's no need to clean off this particular marker—a special detail polishes every one, every night—but he does so anyway before sitting on his knees before it.

"Morning," he addresses the stone easily. "Looks like we've got a new Hokage now, huh? He's a friend of your brother's, you know—and yeah, Sasuke has a friend, try not to faint." Shisui grins a little bit. He may not have been able to keep his promise to look after Sasuke as well as he'd have liked—the kid just wouldn't accept a replacement for his brother, not that that was any kind of surprise—but on the other hand he hadn't gotten into too many fights or ended up a hermit, so Shisui figured he'd done his job.

"Yashiro—you remember him, right? Well, he finally retired. I never thought it'd happen. Figured he'd still be out on the battlefield ten years from now with his cane, kicking the ass of every whippersnapper he came across." He can all but see a reproachful little eyebrow raise, and sighs. "I know, I know, I'll stop there. 'Show respect to my elders' and all, as you would say.

"Anyway, back to Sasuke. His hair is getting _long_, like you wouldn't believe. He's almost got enough to put in a ponytail now. Can you picture it? _I_ sure can't. Sasuke was born with that weird cockatoo hairstyle; you were always the girly-haired one." Something like a laugh gets stuck in his throat.

"_I never knew your girly hair could be so useful." A grin. A dry comment dying in someone's mouth just before—_

Shisui coughs. "Well, you'd probably hit me for that if you were here. Put it on my tab for when I make it up there, alright? Shouldn't be too long now anyway." He scratches the back of his neck uncomfortably. Somehow, even long dead, Itachi has the uncanny ability to revert him back to an awkward teenager. "Sorry, guess that was kind of morbid. All I'm saying is it'll give you something to look forward to."

He manages a laugh this time. It sounds choked and his clears his throat, annoyed with himself. "Anyway, I'd better get going. I've got class in half an hour. Me, a teacher—now _that_ never ceases to be a disturbing thought."

He gets to his feet slowly and exhales. "Well, you take care of yourself. And enjoy your alone time," he adds with a tiny little grin, "because once I get up there I'm not letting you out of my sight."

Shisui brushes gently over the engraved name of his best friend.

"See you tomorrow, Itachi."

Something else tries to follow those words but it too gets stuck in his throat.

_I should probably get that checked out._

He steps away from the memorial stone just as a cool breeze picks up, brushing his ever-unruly hair into his face and sending a shiver down his spine. Somewhere he can hear wind chimes being blown around.

Shisui closes his eyes, smiles, and keeps walking.

**-fin**


End file.
